


The Good That Won't Come Out

by seedubs



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Waeroplanes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 19:52:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16878168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seedubs/pseuds/seedubs
Summary: In which an American ignores the State Department’s travel advisory for Paris, and a fashion mogul capitalizes on a good PR opportunity.





	The Good That Won't Come Out

 

_You've got a heart on fire_   
_Bursting with desire_   
_You've got a heart filled with passion_   
_Will you let it burn for hate or compassion_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Magic smelled sweet.

For one shining second the air hummed with the soft heat and sweet aroma of a bakery’s open door; then reality slapped back into place. Literally _smacked_ as the baggage claim was rearranged with a cacophony of plastic chairs falling back into orderly rows and luggage of all sizes dropped back onto newly undented carousels in one fell swoop. The girl groaned as the pillar debris she’d been leaning up against popped out of existence and she landed hard onto the cold linoleum.

Overhead, the terminal loudspeaker crackled to life with a pre-recorded message, first in French ( _Mesdames et Messieurs, l'attaque d'Akuma est..._ ) then English ( _Please see your ticket agent for all travel updates..._ ) and so on, until it cycled past the romance languages into ones that escaped her passable understanding ( _Ochitsuite kudasai!_ ). Other than a pair of schoolchildren who’d run immediately to the freshly repaired window, faces pressed and cranning against the glass, trying to glimpse beyond the planes taxied on the runway - where only minutes before two superheroes and a towering “Charles de Gaullzilla” monster had battled - no one in the airport was moving with much urgency.

The girl sighed as she hauled herself off the ground. It wasn’t like she could claim surprise. The State Department’s travel advisory for Paris had warned of magical terrorism with bureaucratic matter of factness.

_Traveling to high-risk locations puts your life, and possibly the lives of others, in jeopardy. Traveling to high-risk areas puts you at risk for kidnapping and hostage-taking. In a crisis, in high risk areas, the United States relies on local infrastructure; the Embassy may not be able to help you with any legal or emotional damages inflicted._

What bullet points couldn’t spell out was color coded for the primal instinct’s eyeballs: red and yellow striped through the map of the arrondissements like a coiled snake waiting to strike.

She had boarded her connection in Heathrow with trepidation sitting on her chest and a thousand what-ifs serving as her in-flight movie. But somewhere between the hour delay spent circling the city in the air as a water-based Akuma turned the streets of Paris into the canals of Venice, and the third attack that had stuck her in Customs watching hypnotized workers mindlessly stamp at passports and visas that they passed down assembly-line style in an unending loop of synchronization, her fear had morphed into something far more dangerous: irritation.

The fear had been better. It was _easier_. Easier than sleeping; easier than packing; easier than listening to the voicemails on her phone. Fear was a selfish thing. It didn’t allow for the distraction of reality.

The reality wasn’t pretty. Her clothes were wrinkled by one too many timezone’s worth of wear, and mismatched by last minute desperation. The oversized hoodie - neon hued with an obnoxiously large emoji with a Statue of Liberty crown on its head - clashed especially against the galaxy pattern of the only clean pair of work out leggings she had on her when she’d left for LAX. But there had only been one tourist trap shop open when she’d stumbled off her red eye for the short layover in Newark (she’d missed a city that never slept by a dozen or so miles), and it only took cash. And she’d been the idiot trying to go to _France_ in _February_ wearing a tanktop. She’d had twenty five dollars on her, a bank account that didn’t need an out-of-network ATM fee on top of a last minute international plane ticket, and the flamingo colored monstrosity had been the only thing on clearance -- but hey, it wasn’t like the people of France were known for judging fashion or anything right.

There it was again - the grating feeling.

Feeling brittle, the girl stretched her still travel stiff arms in front of her and tried to picture shoving the irritability away as she stood to join the already forming queue at the airline kiosk. Imaginary violence felt nicer than it should have - nicer than it _would_ have if the day had been a normal one. If she had a normal day’s amount of sleep (any). If she had a normal day’s worth of magical hijinks (none). If she hadn’t _needed_ \-- but then, of course, that was the danger of aggravation. It threw the worst of reality at her face, _daring_ her to ignore it.

But it wasn’t the time for that. Not yet. The feelings that had been shadowing her since she started continent hopping were persistently and steadily trickling into her like she was a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water. She _knew_ it, and she _felt_ it, but she had to let it simmer.

Just a little longer. Just to get through Paris.

Paris, however, seemed determined to keep her.

“I’m sorry,” the reservation agent said in practiced English, “But the flight with your luggage on it was rerouted during the last Akuma attack to Lisbon --”

“ _Lisbon_?”

“Lisbon, Portugal, yes, unfortunately --”

“I - I know wh -- there are other airports in France, aren’t there!” It was probably because her voice got softer instead of louder, that her shoulders dropped instead of her hands raising, that the agent took pity on her. Condescending bluster - the customer service weapon against the angry masses - was replaced with slightly less condescending pity.

“Yes, mademoiselle, but unfortunately due to many of the other airlines also rerouting, those airports filled quickly. Your luggage will of course be on the flight returning here, once the plane has refueled.”

Which could take hours as traffic control sorted through every delayed flight now vying for runway. Of course.

“But --” The word fell out clunkily as she took a minute to breathe back in the hopelessness behind it. _Not yet._ “Okay. Cool. Um -- okay, merci beaucoup. Tenez-moi au courant s'il vous plait.”

She turned away, squaring her shoulders, and tried to invent a branch of mathematics that would multiply her hours as she circled the fittingly round terminal aimlessly.

“Excuse me!” The voice was loud, confident, and coming from directly in front of her. “Excusez moi, mademoiselle. Est-ce que tu parles français?”

She looked up from tracking her own footsteps to find a whole gaggle of a news crew in front of her. The woman who had spoken stepped towards her with a clipboard cocked against her hip and the hint of a bluetooth headset peeking through her chin length bob -- a producer, then. Slightly behind her a cameraman shouldered his equipment casually, in the midst of a hushed conversation with a polished looking reporter, and a headphone draped soundman. The producer, seeing she had the girl’s attention, waved - the press badge for her station, TVi, rustling with the movement.

“Ah, oui,” the girl said, switching to their language with the kind of careful voice that came from having to say everything you thought with a seven second translation delay, “I speak a little. My accent is not … great though.”

The producer’s smile slid smoothly into something a little more anticipatory. Some change in posture captured her co-workers’ attention, as they turned to the girl like a finely tuned unit.

“No, no,” the producer said, “It’s very good for -- American, yes?” She switched to English at the girl’s nod. “We are looking to interview someone and get an international perspective on traveling to Paris today … especially in light of the number of attacks. Would you be comfortable answering questions for our viewers, _en français_?”

She recoiled at the suggestion, hands coming up automatically at the thought. Her dark circles could be used as Rorschach tests. Her hair looked like a comb had died in it. She was dressed like she was color-blind and friendless. There were a baker’s dozen worth of curses stuck in the back of her throat from the day already, thrashing to be finally let loose. There were more reasons to say no than there were fingers in the terminal to list them on.

“I don’t know,” she said haltingly in French, “I’m not …dressed well?”

“It’s an airport! You’re dressed for comfort,” the producer soothed, “We’ll shoot from the neck up.”

Small comforts.

And so she found herself, too tired to protest, blinking against the makeshift lighting of the camera set up, answering questions live on French television.

“ -- in his tweeted reply, Mayor Bourgeois disagreed and contends that Paris is still safe for all travellers. Why did you think it was safe to travel here today?”

She hadn’t. She hadn’t afforded herself the luxury of consideration until she was 35,000 feet above the Atlantic. Having second thoughts meant letting herself think things through in the first place, and if she’d done that … she’d still be on her knees in a dorm in California. She swallowed. No one wanted to hear _that_.

“Ah. When I left, um, there wasn’t so much … activity,” she heard herself say.

“Yes,” the reported agreed sympathetically, “The four Akuma attacks so far today is an unprecedented escalation in Hawk Moth’s behavior.”

Her body angled away from the girl, speaking into the camera and beyond to the newsdesk at the station, “We’ll have behavioral analysts speaking in our coverage --”

The girl half-listened as a wave of exhaustion with the effort of being functionally human sucker punched her attention span. She didn’t know how many hours she’d been awake now. She didn’t know how many hours she’d waste waiting there. She didn’t know if she’d _make it_.

She didn’t know, she didn’t know, she didn’t know --

Her mind stuttered. And then it stuttered again.

(There was a crushing inevitability of _emotion_ in her future, but not here. Not now, _please_.)

She looked for something else to fill herself with - some last reserve of energy to pull from - and all she found was spite.

“You don’t need ‘behavioral analysts’ for _him_ ,” she said, as the frustration tendrilled through her body, and spouted out her mouth, interrupting the newscast. “Hawk Moth. What a stupid name for a stupid - fricking ridiculous - man? Organization? Whatever! It’s a stupid _reality_ with him in it.”

She was vaguely aware of the camera shifting back to her as she spoke, fumbling over her French as her thoughts came fast and half-formed with indiscriminate agitation.

“He - he’s just - _obviously_ he was watching Battlestar Galactica in his mom’s basement and got the great idea to copy cat and attack every 30 frickin’ minutes because he doesn’t have anything better to do,” she spat, not entirely certain what language she was speaking in besides angry, “He’s not complicated. He’s just a - a stupid, giant nerd!”

If it were possible to experience second-hand embarrassment for yourself, she would have; regular embarrassment didn’t feel like enough. As it was, her movements in the immediate aftermath came to her in a sluggish, out-of-body sort of haze - her other senses maybe dulled by the excessive heat that spread across her face.

“Ah, well,” the reporter covered admirably, as the producer made a frantic ‘wrap it up’ gesture from beside the camera, “That is … that is certainly one possible discussion to be had. And we’ll be looking at all of them with our continuing coverage --”

“I just want my suitcase,” she said, small and breaking and ignored.

 

***  
  
  


She was sure she apologized - certain the Midwest in her wouldn’t let her walk away without one - but the post-interview conversation was a blur meant only for remembering on future nights when her brain wouldn’t let her sleep. (So every night then.)

She needed fresh air.

The park and ride outside baggage claim was only marginally less crowded than inside the building, but somehow it felt like there were fewer eyes there. Fewer witnesses. Just as the calendar predicted, the breeze outside was chilly and the drop in temperature was only amplified by the dulled glow of sunlight the late afternoon offered. The cheap fabric of her sweatshirt held up miserably against the elements, but it was worth the extra heat loss to seek out the even cooler shade of the shadows, and further escape from notice.

It was probably because of the dark that she didn’t notice the butterfly.

(Sometimes, back in Missouri, there’d be moments before the tornado sirens went off when it felt like the world had frozen. That, for one moment, eternity was a silence that stretched for as far as the eye could see while the sky pressed down towards you with clouds too dark and too heavy to stay afloat. The air was sick and the whole world stopped in anticipation of its release.

_And then there was a roar._ )

Magic didn’t smell sweet. Miracles did.

The difference turned out to be palpable.

She tasted smoke on the back of her throat; smelled the tang of decay hidden underneath the sharpness of a forest fire’s kindling. It had been cold before; now there was a heat - coming from within her - that felt like melting. Her vision went ultraviolet, her eyes focusing on the purple haze in front of her with a bird of prey’s laser-like focus, _waiting_.

There was a heartbeat’s hesitation.

Then there was a storm of electricity, striking patterns at her face.

It didn’t feel like shattering.

She was already shattered, and now every jagged little piece of her was slamming back together, building something stronger, something focused and _**furious**_.

“Jet Lag,” a voice spoke into her mind with a thunderous clap, “I am Hawk Moth. It is so very frustrating not having your belongings alongside you. I, too, am missing items that are very precious to me. I will grant you the power to retrieve what you have lost, if you will aid me in taking Ladybug and Chat Noir’s Miraculouses.”

Her fists clenched at her sides, nails digging into palms, but she didn’t feel it. Instead she felt …

(A scream her voice was still hoarse from.

The weight of a glass as it slipped through her hands to the floor.

A lead foot pressed down inside a speeding car.

An anger without end burning her inside and out.

A feral fear of what would happen when she stopped.)

… temptation.

The apple wasn’t sweeter, some part of her realized that, but it was easier.

“Yes,” she said and watched as the magic worked its way inwards -- as she filled herself to empty herself.

The butterfly vanished at the first syllable, melding into the small backpack that was laid at her feet. Her carry-on contained a textbook from last semester; four different half-used chapsticks; headphones with one dead earbud; enough identification to steal her identity with and enough money to make it not worth the effort; a towel; more clutter than she had memories of making. The bag rose, strapping itself to her back like a parachute, and then all it was filled with was a driving sense of purpose.

Fragile fabric stiffened around her limbs then stretched past the boundaries of sleeves and cuffs enveloping her skin in a two-tone lacquer. The ombre coloring worked its way up her body, the solidly bronze base at her feet giving way to a speckled patina of seafoam green that solidified in the seven spikes that had replaced her hair. She didn’t feel heavier - if anything she felt angular - but a reflexive swing of her arm felt… stiffer, like her joints didn’t hinge in quite the same way anymore. When she spoke, she tasted copper.

“What next?”

 

***

 

It was so easy.

The waking world had a dream’s logic. Jet Lag didn’t walk; she glided, jet thrusters streaming from what used to be feet. When something got in her way she moved it with the wicked heat of a jet blast pouring out her palms.

She didn’t think, and it was such a gift.

Force and thrust. Give and take.

(And take.

_And take_.)

The wind rolled out of her in gales, cutting the things it touched to ribbons like it was _nothing_ , like plastic and concrete were someone’s _wet tissues_ , like she _wanted it to_.

People cowered but she fixed that.

“Be useful,” she said, the spikes of her crown flying out like darts to a bullseye, and then - finally, _finally_ \- they were.

Her drones -- so helpful now -- sorted through the flotsam of clothes she left in her wake, searching for the right replacements because she _needed_ it, and she _wanted_ it, and that was _enough_ , and that was why it had _always_ been hers to have.

It _should_ be that simple. It _should_ be that easy.

(But it still wasn’t _enough_.)

She built a throne of suitcases with one hand then smashed it down with the other.

When the yo-yo pulled one of her drones out of the air it was a welcomed distraction.

“You know, I don’t think all of that is duty-free,” Ladybug said as she made her approach.

And that was fine. That was perfect. She would take from them too.

“The only thing I’m missing is your jewelry!”

“Ah, now, see, that’s definitely going to be taxing for you,” Chat Noir’s voice came from behind her, “You should probably just give up.”

She blasted him into a nearby arrival/departure board and cackled.

They circled her, and her drones circled them, and she was a cyclone, arms outstretched and spinning, spinning, spinning, her walls gusting and impenetrable.

(Until they weren’t.)

Chat Noir went up, baton catapulting him into the sky even as her drones weighed down at his ankles. Her hand arced up with him -- swept away his plotted trajectory -- but left her side open as broadly as any barn’s.

It was the break Ladybug had been waiting for, her speed a blur of red and black that Jet Lag’s stiff jointed body couldn’t compete with, crossing the space between them, her yo-yo lassoing around her opponent’s upright arm. She jerked it down and started to reel the Akuma in.

Jet Lag wheeled her free arm around to blast at the heroine, and sprayed the last of her too-slow-on-the-uptake drones back instead.

Behind her, the cat had landed on his feet. His baton expanded at her back, pushing her closer to Ladybug as he quipped, “I think you’re right, my lady. Hawk Moth’s designs are really getting the wind taken out of them.”

Ladybug combined the momentum of the baton push with a sharp, leaning pull on the yo-yo string, spinning Jet Lag around so she landed with her back to the heroine, without so much as a blink.

“He has to be slowing down if his Akumas are,” she said with no little amount of relief, “Finally.”

Chat Noir’s baton was pointed at her chest. It wasn’t fair.

Ladybug’s hand was reaching for the bag and it wasn’t fair.

It was all happening too quickly. Which wasn’t fair when--

“Are you slowing down?” The voice in her head said, a cool intrusion on thoughts that were flying off too hot, “Are you _done_ , Jet Lag?”

It wasn’t fair when all she had to block the past was the feeling of moving forward.

It wasn’t fair that they could take from her, when she had nothing left to give.

It wasn’t fair that they could move so fast when --

When --

_Oh_.

The thought surfaced with dream-like clarity.

_They couldn’t be quicker than her when she was a jet._

In one breath she was cowed and cornered.

She exhaled and felt the magic stretch to match her mind.

(It sounded like a roar.)

It happened so quickly. The stiff-jointed parts of her unfurled, stretching her, rearranging her -- _reassembling_ her. Her arms popped out of their sockets. Her spine extended, pitching her body to its knees as her cartilage melted away, allowing her bones -- her _parts_ \-- to clash against one another as her new shape formed.

Ladybug was knocked back by the force of her feet exploding into twin engines, though her yo-yo remained hooked around her arm -- no, her wing, now. Chat Noir’s baton was bounced back to him as the bottlenose front of an airplane replaced the actual nose on her face.

It felt like falling.

It felt like walking over a bed of coals.

It felt like breaking and clanking, and it felt like the sound of a construction site vibrating through her skull.

But she was winning, and she was laughing, because she was still moving, she hadn’t stopped yet, and she wouldn’t stop -- her wheels were already running her down the runway, like they were made to, like she was made to _because she was a jet_.

She laughed until she didn’t have a mouth.

Watched herself launch into the air until she didn’t have eyes.

She could have sworn the last thing she heard before she lost her ears was a low chuckle in her mind.

“I didn’t think so.”

But then she didn’t have a mind.

She was a jet.

 

***  
  
  
  


She couldn’t breathe.

Nothing was coming to her - no rise of her chest, no sense of sensation of the air flowing through her. There was nothing there, and she couldn’t breathe.

Her life didn’t flash before her eyes.

Instead what she got was an out-of-body, bird’s eye view of the fighter jet that had once been _her_ doing barrel rolls over the Eiffel Tower, two dangling superheroes clinging to its wings. Her carry-on bag was nestled safely in the jet’s cockpit -- but there was no sign of her body, no place for her mind.

Except.

Except cogito ergo fricking sum.

It was a phantom limb. It was _I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream_. It was sleep paralysis without end because she wanted to gasp, and there was _nothing_ there but the overwhelming ache of her breath’s absence.

“What did I do?” She said to the air, letting the panic overtake her when her voice didn’t make a sound, “What did I do, what did I do, whatdidIdo -- “

Remembering crashed into her in waves; the running, the deal with the devil, the shame.

It was a moment of weakness.

(And she couldn’t breathe because _she didn’t have lungs_.)

And she said _yes_.

(And -- now was not the time for Taylor Swift, brain.)

(And -- oh god, hypoxia didn’t care if you were a fighter jet.)

( _Should’ve said no._ )

Wailing into the ether didn’t change anything, but it seemed like the only available option for her.

(Because if she could complain, she was human; if she could still complain, she was still - however spectrally - alive.)

“This is the worst day,” she moaned.

And then, as if he were standing over her shoulder, she heard a muttered response.

“Agreed.”

“Wh -- you can hear me!?” Her relief soured before she could relish the feeling. “What did you do? Let me go!”

Silence.

“Oh - c’mon, you _coward_ , I don’t have time for this, I --” and then she felt his attention square on her. Felt the terse chill of his answer.

“You are currently _several_ kilometers above Paris,” Hawkmoth said, “Where exactly should I ‘let you go’?”

“You know what I mean - ”

He cut her off again. “Do you? You’re here because I gave you the power you wanted.”

“I don’t -- I don’t want it anymore,” she said it firmly, but her mind stumbled on the half-truth of it -- on the stubborn necessity of wanting things. “Not like this.”

“Be that as it may,” and he didn’t sound smug exactly -- more to-the-point, the professor leading the dunce to water, which was almost equally infuriating, “I believe you’ll find that you are … stuck on auto-pilot.”

Oh, wow, did she want to punch him.

“Temper.” Hawkmoth warned.

“Are you fricking kidding me!”

She had tried. Put it on her tombstone, project it to the stars -- let the future know that she had well and truly tried. She’d fought exhaustion and international travel and _airline customer service_ , and she had given it the good fight, and she had lost. The thin red line separating her ability to Handle Things from Not Handling It was gone.

She sputtered.

“I - you - look. Okay. I am - I’m probably going to wind up on the No Fly List after this? Even though ‘ _I’m a jet_ ’? So -- cool. Poetic. And - and! This is -- people are going to Google me and it’s gonna be a French news auto-tune remix of me talking nerdy, and then my fricking obituary is going to mention my Darwin Award before the Nobel I won’t win now because, oh my god, what grad school is going to accept an idiot who accidentally does terrorism? So, _sorry_ if I’m a little testy that you decided to Yeerk your way into my head and ruin my life!”

“... I beg your pardon?”

The withering disdain almost masked his confusion. Almost.

“ It’s an Ani -- okay,” somehow she managed to feel sheepish which, while low on the list of things about the day so far that were stupid, was still pretty ridiculous, “Okay, so, you’re probably not some nerd in your mom’s basement, are you?”

“No. I am not.”

She realized it then - with that answer, she wasn’t hearing his satisfaction. The pride, the superiority that flashed through -- she was _feeling_ the emotions that stirred in him (and she was feeling him clamp them down just as quickly as they came with the mental weight of control).

The line between them wasn’t a dead end street, but a bridge.

She tested her hypothesis. “So, then… on TV? I annoyed you? _That’s_ what this is about?”

She felt a confirmation in the foreign flash of irritation that prickled in her mind, even though her question was met with (sullen) silence.

Well then. It wasn’t like she had any better options.

“Wow. Super-villainry so fragile, huh?”

“You were an experiment,” Hawk Moth enunciated clearly, “And your failure has been noted.”

It stung the over-achiever in her that’d been coddled since grade school, and she was tired all over again.

“Please.” She tried anew. “I don’t have time for this.”

“ _Neither do I._ ”

His voice didn’t raise. His candor never changed.

But the frustration -- the man was a parallel universe’s hurricane. The eye of the storm swaddling the raging winds centered within. The truth of him - the fissure of feelings leaking out of him was…

(A mirror.

An echo.)

… familiar.

 

“... Are you okay?” She said, feeling the surprise for the question startle out of both of them.

She was answered by a wall of silence.

“Has no one ever asked you that before?”

The silence stretched on.

In the corporeal world, heat seeking missiles were locked on the pair of Parisian heroes who were, in turn, still hooked onto the jet that had launched them.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said to the air, “I don’t know what you _want_.”

(The Animorphs defeated their Yeerks with war crimes, excessive recitation of Shakespeare and grandfather paradoxes, and - in that one book with the skunks - grape juice - which … didn’t really bode well for her chances.)

“I mean - okay, yes, I know the jewelry. But - those are missiles, and -- don’t you get tired of listening to people like me freak out about _killing_ for you?”

“No.”

A single word had never sounded so final.

“No? What do you mean ‘no’, what kind of --”

“Akumas capture a mind in a specific moment, and keep it there. Turning you into an inanimate object seems to have freed your … conscious from that timespace. So, I mean no. There is usually less babbling.”

Small fricking comfort.

“Comment dit-on ‘informed consent’ en français?” It was only the awareness that he could feel her anger flare that kept her from actually snarling.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Make you into a monster? That’s your monopoly, right?”

“Pigeons. Birthday parties. _Spilled milk._. People cry out for instant gratification for the most trivial mishaps. Don’t compare my _year_ of waiting,” he said, the word almost drowning her with its weight, “to your transient desire for a suitcase packed by someone with a toddler’s sense of fashion.”

Something on the edge of his words, a feeling sharper than any blade, twisted into her and wrung her out to dry.

“I need my suitcase because I can’t,” and oh there it was. The truth she’d been running from.

And she still wasn’t ready for it; how hard it was to choke down the taste of a spoiled future; how it stole her voice and left a stranger’s mewling in its place.

“Because I can’t go to my _friend’s_ \--”

She hated how the word had lost its meaning. There had been potential in it.

It was a building block. A seed.

Every element in the universe -- stardust, atoms, _chemistry_ and the inevitability of time.

All the cosmic background radiation for a future waiting to happen.

Gone.

“Because I can’t go to _my friend’s funeral_ dressed like this.”

The silence still managed to be deafening even when she wasn’t listening for it.

A small part of her might have welcomed the distraction of his response.

But very quickly that part of her was overtaken by the sudden realization that she could feel the night air whipping around her.

And she definitely felt the sudden drop as she fell with decidedly human limbs flailing.

Her scream of surprise at least, that shrieked out of her before she passed out from the height, was echoed by the two falling superheroes in the cloudy air beside her.

 

***  
  
  


The shock blanket was scratchy.

It prickled against her neck every time she turned her head to take in the new round of questions from a first responder, a steady, consistent proof of concept that she wasn’t dreaming. It was a well needed reminder; her mind still felt caught between a fever and a dream. Memories of the fall came to her in flashes.

A paint spill approximation of Paris glowing brighter than any night sky’s constellations growing larger beneath her feet.

The way the air warmed around her as a voice above her called out a miracle.

The sound of an open parachute whipping in the air, as two strong spandex arms grabbed her.

When they’d landed, the butterfly had been waiting for them. It fluttered with an air of impatience around her bag and didn’t protest when Ladybug sent it on its way, lighter and brighter, cleaning the damage ( _her_ damage) as it went.

Her legs had buckled out from under her around the same time the tears had started falling, and then she’d lost track of time -- became anchored only to the sense of loss she knew wouldn’t abandon her. Someone moved her, and she didn’t remember protesting.

Now she sat on the back of an ambulance, legs swinging over the open back doors edge with the last of her restless energy, and body slumped with the too-familiar weight of waiting. The quiet was doing her brain no favors, but, thankfully, next to her a superhero was clearing his throat awkwardly.

Chat Noir was a lounger - true to theme there. His posture slanted against the wheel of the ambulance, and he rested his chin on the top of his hands which were balanced like a counter-weight on his staff. He’d stayed there - a lazy feline guard dog - as the paramedics had given her a requisite once over, cracking jokes through the whole process, but when they had left his energy had left with them.

He’d been avoiding her eyes (not that she could really blame him, she had a vague recollection of drop kicking him across the Air Emirates check in turnstiles). It gave her an opportunity to study him -- gave her something else to focus on.

He was smaller than he looked online.

(The girl too, though she had run off not long after they landed -- something about recharging.)

Smaller, and younger and - once you got past the eyes - so human looking.

And she’d almost killed him. For a suitcase.

She tilted her head back and groaned.

“Just toss me into a black hole already.”

“Eh - sorry?” Two giant, green eyes stared at her with alarmed confusion. “What was that about a black hole?”

Oh _fantastic_ , he spoke English. The feeling - the embarrassment - flared in her chest for just long enough to show on her face, and then, just as quickly as it came, it just … stopped.

Numbness and inertia took over again, and she sighed.

“Sorry,” she said making a conscious effort not to mumble as she switched to French, “... it’s just - I’m just tired. Don’t mind me.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, head tilting back to look up at the night sky. His eyes closed, but his face never relaxed. And for a second he stayed like that, body still but not peaceful, until his eyes re-opened languidly, like he knew she was staring, voice lilting with a lazy playfulness. “I could really go for a cat nap.”

Of course he could. This was - what, the fifth, sixth time he had done this today? One more day of madness added on to a count of hundreds before it.

“I’m sorry --”

“Don’t be,” he looked over to her, “I’m sorry we’re keeping you when you’re traveling --”

“It’s fine,” she said, a small hiccup of a laugh escaping her helplessly because her body didn’t know how to do feelings properly anymore, “I would have been stuck here anyway. The airline lost my luggage.”

Three layovers, two budget airlines, and a train ticket to Lyon that had departed forty five minutes ago -- all to get her nowhere. The toll of it must have shown on her face because Chat Noir squeezed her shoulder sympathetically.

“Ladybug will be back soon,“ he said, and then with a professional smile fell into the ease of distracting small talk. “You’re an American, right? Your French is very good - did you come here to study it?”

“No, I -- my major’s in physics.”

“Oh!” A flicker of sincere interest lit up behind the mask. “What made you learn French then?”

A foreign exchange program in high school. A semester abroad for college. A 22 hour uninterrupted Skype call when she’d come home from having her appendix out. Six years of Christmas cards - of birthday cards - of postcards just because. So many facebook messages during the World Cup it crashed the app on her phone.

She swallowed down the memories.

“CERN is in the French speaking part of Switzerland.”

The genuine smile of interest that drew out of him was a gift she didn't think he knew he was giving.

She wanted to tell him that when she was a TA she was going to force freshmen to care about physics at 8 A.M. by teaching them perpetual motion using him and a slice of buttered toast.

She wanted to tell him that his fricking "Cataclysm" had ruined, at minimum, two different post-doc students' work in her department alone.

She wanted to tell him so many things about how he - and Ladybug - had become part of the natural order of life that it was easy to forget they were just people under their masks. She wanted to tell him that the natural order of things could change in a heartbeat - in a heartbreak - and it was stupid, it was so incredibly stupid to not appreciate people while they were there.

She wanted to tell him thank you.

But she didn't.

(Because it was like her daydream of actually meeting Taylor Swift and telling her that the closest thing to a religious experience she'd ever had was driving in upstate New York in the fall, screaming out the lyrics to "All Too Well". Profound in her head; incredibly unlikely to translate well in person.)

Instead she nodded her head at the roofline of the airport, where a super-heroine was zipping down to them.

Ladybug was all business. Her pleasant greeting couldn't hide the tenacity in her eyes; there was a focus to her that would not be deterred - not when there was a problem in front of her that still needed solving.

"Do you remember what happened?" Her voice was gentle, even as her eyes were peering.

Chat Noir gestured dramatically, a foppish arm coming up to craddle his forehead as he swooned against Ladybug. "Yes, the curiosity is killing me!"

She watched Ladybug's mouth twitch as she pushed Chat Noir away out of habit, taking the moment to think about her answer.

"... I remember some of it. Some of it - it's like ... I was watching it happen, but I don't -- it feels like someone else's memories."

Ladybug nodded sympathetically. "Do you remember anything about Hawkmoth?"

She remembered...

The hot and the cold of the anger.

The bargaining. The denial.

The lack of acceptance.

But where his thoughts started and hers ended? She couldn't say.

"He said, uh, " she swallowed, realizing with a glance at their expressions she'd been silent longer than she intended, "He said today was a bad day."

Ladybug's nose scrunched up with concentration, while next to her Chat Noir's frown was a crooked line of consideration while his eyes studied the floor.

"Did he say why? Or - did he say anything about himself that could have been identifying?"

"... he doesn't live in his mom's basement." It sounded so stupid leaving her mouth, "I'm sorry. I should have -- god, why didn't I _think_ to --"

"Hey, hey," Ladybug's hand was on her shoulder, "It's okay. You didn't do anything wrong. You're here. You broke free, didn't you? No one's ever done that before."

She looked up uncertainly.

"So he said he was having a bad day, and you were able to overpower him. That's great!" Ladybug clarified at her dubious expression. "It means ... it means he can get tired, just like us. It means he's _human_ , just like us --"

"I don't think that's what happened." It came out of her in one hot rush of shame-warmed breath. "I didn't _beat_ him. I just --"

She stopped, flustered. Some stupid, small part of her was weighing down her tongue.

Because - because it wasn't right, to spill someone else's secrets. It wasn't right to shine a spotlight on feelings still growing in the dark.

(Because it wasn't right to do what he did every fricking day.)

Her hands pulled the shock blanket's edges until it felt like a stiffened weight against her shoulders. Empathy was the currency of intimacy, and she didn't want any part of it. She was spent.

"... He didn't want to feel what I was feeling anymore."

"And what were you feeling?"

"Grief."

The heroes shared a look that was one part startled and one part ... mournful recognition(oh, _Chat_ ) but they didn't have long to digest her confession. Any questions that they might have asked were interrupted by the airport announcement system.

At first the message felt like a trick.

_Mesdames et Messieurs..._

Because it wasn't a threat level announcement, and it wasn't the all-clear signal.

_...une offre généreuse pour les passagers_

It was exactly what she needed.

_... de la collection hiver Gabriel_

Free clothes.

She could pinch herself.

"What." She said in the same breath as Ladybug and Chat Noir. (Though not quite with the same tones).

She wanted to run, to finally, finally get out of there, but there was a wall of spandex in her way, and the weight of a thousand questions pulling at her ankles.

But the weirdness of the day wasn't done with her yet.

A car was driving up the terminal to meet them. She wasn't a car person, but she could recognize its silent, sleek approach as the sort of fluid machinery only expensive tastes could buy. What she couldn't recognize was what it was doing _there_ , past the barriers of the emergency responders, gliding up the runway like there was a private jet waiting for it and not an ambulance.

The car stopped a respectable distance from them, the door opening to reveal the kind of woman who was just so unequivocally French it explained why the phrase ‘je n'ais se quoi’ had so proliferated the global vocabulary. She matched the vehicle perfectly; slender and sleek, and moving with purpose. She carried a tablet and stylus the way a conductor carried a baton.

"Good evening," she greeted the trio, her voice not giving any indication that the circumstances of their meeting was unusual.

"N - Ms. Sancouer," Chat Noir said, lifting his jaw up from the floor, "What are you doing here?"

Ladybug still seemed in a daze next to him - her eyes wide, glazed over saucers ever since the airport announcement.

"Oh - my apologies. Did the announcement not play out here?" The woman didn't look especially apologetic. She also didn't give Chat Noir much more than a cursory look of acknowledgement. No, instead her even-eyed gaze returned to and stayed on the girl.

There was a judgement being passed on her - like a professor searching to see if she'd actually done the assigned reading - that much she was certain. But the woman's poker face was resolute; she only gave enough to let you know there was more you couldn't have.

"Gabriel Agreste is pleased to announce that he is opening up the airport Gabriel store to any and all travelers who have been waylaid by the recent Hawk Moth incidents."

_Gabriel Agreste_. It was piece of pop culture her brain had consumed once like empty calories. An hour wasted on an Oscar red carpet show. A tag on a GoFugYourself post she read once. An ad in the kind of magazines she pretended she didn't read while waiting in line at the grocery store. His was a familiar kind of sad story - a brilliant mind, a meteoric success, a great tragedy, an easily consumable loss - she knew the melody, but not the words.

"That's - that's amazing," Ladybug had found her voice, and her enthusiasm, "The whole store, really?"

But again, the super hero was ignored, and the gaze behind the glasses held only her eyes.

"Mr. Agreste would like to personally offer you this piece from his new collection."

The words didn't make sense, no matter what language she played them through in her mind.

She stared dumbly at the woman, desperate for something - anything - click into place. The woman inclined her head graciously toward the car, where a giant of a man stepped out of the driver's seat, and opened the passenger side door to delicately produce a dainty clothing bag that seemed dwarfed in his over-sized hands. He offered it to the girl silently.

"I don't understand," she said, looking back and forth between the bag and the woman (and maybe she was projecting but she could have sworn there was a flicker of the woman's brow meant to convey an answer of 'Clearly'.)

She took the garment bag gingerly, like it was going to explode on her, her fingers brushing against the zipper uncertainly.

"How - what - he doesn't even know my size," she said a jumble of resistance.

"Mr. Agreste watched your interview." The woman explained. "Sizing from there wasn't difficult."

So much for shooting from the neck up.

Her fingers opened the bag more for something to do than from a real curiosity on her part, but - well. Schrodinger's cat was both inquisitive and limited with options.

She felt the fabric before she saw it. It was soft to the touch, the fabric gliding around her prodding fingers like sand falling through an hourglass, while still feeling weighty enough to match the winter season. She tugged it gently out of the bag to take in the shape of it, and almost gasped.

The dress before her was the truest kind of black - so dark, it couldn't help but capture the eye's gaze in the depths of its own gravity. It struck a pretty silhouette. The cut was mid-length, but the thin accordion pleat of the skirt made it feel longer - drew attention to where the wearer's legs would fall in a way that would made them look leaner and alluring. As the fabric traveled upwards, it lost its breezy flow and stiffened into something more structured; a high collared neckline was supported by conservative cap sleeves. The structured bodice was made of a thicker, stiffer fabric, embroidered with lace overlay. The vertical ruching split and curved around the v-neck of the neckline, fanning out over the hips. The transition between the two extremes felt effortless - the true sign of the craftsmanship behind it - but it wasn't what had taken her breath away.

It looked like butterfly wings.

It was dark, and beautiful, and more expensive then her rent money undoubtedly, and it sat there in its beauty, _daring_ her to compare something so lovely to something so terrible as an Akuma. Daring her to try to think of herself as something equally terrible while wearing it.

“Oh,” she swallowed hard, as it struck her that if she wore it she’d never get to hear the one opinion that really mattered to her on it, “It’s --”

Words failed her.

Thankfully Ladybug was happy to chime in with a … surprisingly verbose amount of praise from besides her. The words drifted past her, as she played with the fabric gently - hands smoothing down imaginary wrinkles, as her mind idled elsewhere. She blinked in surprise when she felt a divot in the stitching -- was that a hidden pocket?

“If you hurry,” The woman’s voice cut through Ladybug’s lavish chittering clearly, “You should be able to find shoes to match it at the Gabriel store.”

Her gaze had not wavered from the girl, monitoring her motions unblinkingly.

It was the exit her body had been craving.

She bid her heroes -spandex and otherwise - adieu with a shoe-sized excuse, clutching the dress to her chest, as she went. As she re-joined the crowds of the airport, her hands wandered back to the secret pocket -- functional high fashion, now there was proof of miracles -- palming the hidden weight within it.

She pulled out the hidden bounty and almost pinched herself.

A wad of enough colorful Euros to easily buy a new flight to make up for the train she’d missed.

A simple business card with a lavish ‘G’ embossed on the front.

On the back, in clear penmanship, it read, _Don’t mention it._

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is dedicated to all the jet-lagged, usually German, tourists at LaGuardia who'd get a camera stuck in their face every time a terror threat level change caused travel delays. 
> 
> Thank you for indulging this a stupidly long piece of fiction about a literally unnamed character. The title comes from a Rilo Kiley song with the same name, and the lyrics quoted at the beginning come from the José González song, 'Killing For Love', if you're curious about that kind of thing.


End file.
